Google BigQuery Data Types

BigQuery is an analytics data warehouse that stores structured data. Structured data is data that is organized and can be outlined via a schema. Similar to an RDBMS, data in BigQuery is organized into rows and columns for the user to query, but the underlying storage is different. BigQuery uses columnar storage to store values of rows and columns, similar to other data warehouse systems on the market. BigQuery can ingest most of the common data types supported by most relational database management systems. Unlike traditional RDBMSes, BigQuery cannot enforce constraints between tables since it is mainly designed for reporting not transactions. BigQuery is not suitable for transactions because it does not support features such as constraints, integrity, and indexes (such as traditional RDBMS); also, latency is high for create and update operations.

For more information on how BigQuery stores data, read this paper by the BigQuery team: https://cloud.google.com/blog/big-data/2016/04/inside-capacitor-bigquerys-next-generation-columnar-storage-format.